Race, Gosnell, and Someone Else’s Children

Perhaps you’ve heard about the MSNBC promo—-part of its “Lean Forward” series—-in which Melissa Harris-Perry asserts that we have to break through our, kind of, private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families. Commenting on the promo in his e-mail newsletter the G-File , Jonah Goldberg makes a fascinating point: Where are all these “no such thing as someone else’s child” people in the Kermit Gosnell case?

The most remarkable thing no one has remarked upon, as far as I can tell, is the disconnect between the Melissa Harris-Perry view about socializing children and what I think we can call the Melissa Harris-Perry view about privatization of snipping the spines of babies. If we all own everyone else’s children, then Kermit Gosnell killed—-barbarically slaughtered, actually—-Harris-Perry’s babies. Why isn’t she angry about that?

Elsewhere on NRO, Peter Kirsanow demolishes the idea that the media blackout in the Gosnell case might be partly excused as a symptom of excessive racial sensitivity:

To this, most may be prompted to repeat Hillary Clintons infamous response, What difference, at this point, does it make? Scores of babies were allegedly slaughtered and women horribly brutalized. The race of the victims is, or should be, irrelevant.

One point Kirsanow doesn’t make, but could have: Some white people support abortion rights precisely because it disproportionately affects minorities. Ruth Bader Ginsburg edged toward this view in an interview with the New York Times in 2009:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we dont want to have too many of.

“That we don’t want to have too many of.” Just a quick reminder, in case you’ve forgotten: Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a sitting justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Far from being an excuse, the race factor, if anything, makes the media all the more culpable.